Everex, the Taiwanese PC maker that sells a $199 Linux PC through Wal-Mart, is showing a $399 ultra-mobile PC, the CloudBook, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tiny notebook is intended to compete with the Asus Eee PC.The CloudBook uses a VIA processor and chipset, and its design closely follows VIA's reference design for a UMPC that it called the VIA NanoBook Ultra Mobile Device (UMD). Another version of the design was expected in Britain from Packard Bell at the end of 2007.

The Everex CloudBook UMPC uses the same tooling as the VIA NanoBook reference design. Click to Enlarge

The CloudBook runs the gOS Rocket Linux OS on VIA's 1.2-GHz C7-M processor, with 512 Mbytes of DDR2, 533-MHz RAM, a 30-Gbyte hard drive, a 7-inch WVGA display (800 x 480), built-in 802.11b/g WLAN, and 10/100 Ethernet. It weighs just under 2 pounds, and comes preloaded with applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype, OpenOffice.org, and others. It is expected to be available from Wal-Mart for $399 beginning Jan. 25.

The CloudBook has many similarities to the Asus Eee PC -- they apparently both use the same slightly compressed keyboard, for example -- but the 30 Gbyte hard drive is a major difference. The Asus computer comes in 4-Gbyte and 8-Gbyte flash memory-based versions.

Everex apparently sees a market opportunity in inexpensive PCs and laptops loaded with Linux: in addition to its Wal-Mart products it supplies the laptop hardware marketed by Zonbu, a company that sells managed hardware on a low-price-plus-subscription model.